THE NEW YORKER the greatest number, although perhaps at the expense of the few. The Amer- ican Beauty rose can be produced only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. So the growth of big business is merely the working out of a law of God and of nature." John D., Sr., happened to hear this epochal preachment. He listened to his twenty-five-year-old progeny with rel- ish and expressed his satisfaction thus: "I would rather see my son doing this work than see him a monarch on his throne." John D. often dropped in on the Bible class and his eyes would soften as he drank in Junior's weekly orations, whatever impression the little homilies made on the other listen- ers. T HE friendly Rockefeller talks were very much like those still addressed to ch1ldish minds in Sunday schools of the old order which contain nothing more dangerous than careless and often inaccurate platitudes from which most children easily and quickly recover. John D., Jr., stuck to the religion of the nursery for ten years. Then he too recovered. Experience in life, in business, in h man contact, brought about a gradual shift in view- point. Rockef ellers are intelligent utili- tarians. Along about 1910, the junior Rockefeller's keen business instinct told him that Protestantism, to survive, must drop many of its outworn inter- denominational d1stinctions. So he read the "new" theology prodigiously and subjected himself to the successive liberalizing influences of President William H. P. Faunce, of Brown University, the late Dr. Cornelius W oelfkin, and the Rev. Harry Emer- son Fosdick, most militant of the mod- ernists. He emerged a most ardent religious progressive and advocate of the Inter-Church Movement. Further, he converted his father, long a disciple of tradition. The two were largely instrumental in bringing Dr. Fosdick to the pulpit of the Park A venue (formerly the Fifth Avenue) Baptist Church. When the church moves from 1ts present home, a small Gothic cathedral on Park Avenue to a new and magnificent structure on Riverside Drive, it will be a "church of the world," according to the plans of the Rockefellers and Dr. Fosdick. Needless to narrate, Mr. Rocke- feller, J r.'s, changing viewpoint does not meet the approval of fundamen- talists of the order of John Roach Straton and J. Frank Norris. These 21 ."l _ ..:-,i:t \. "We'd better get the big one-they're going on the Leviathan." . honorable reverends cannot be calm when they speak of John D., Jr. Their fear is not lessened by knowledge that the junior Rockefeller is likely to prove as efficient in religious as he has in social and industrial reform. So they unleash their thunder upon him: he IS misguidedly seeking to stand- ardize education through German rationalization. He is diabolically at- tempting to standardize religion through elimination of the supernat- ural and repudiation of the "funda- mentals of the faith." In spite of the fact that John D. is popularly, although not wholly justly, supposed to have built his wealth upon this idea of industrial autocracy, John D., Jr., is an industrial democrat. He is strong for "Republics of Labor"- unselfish and equal representation of capital and labor upon company arbi- tration boards. He gives verbal sup- port even to the idea of labor unions, within certain limits. "Human rights above dividends!)) has been his cry, at least since 1 915. . N INETEEN-FIFTEEN was a crucial year in the development of the younger Rockefeller. This period marked his coming of age in the eyes of his father. The story is interesting: In 1913 and 1914, 1t will be re- called, there were violent labor dis- turbances and much bloodshed in Colorado on the property of the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Miners were shot down by hired guards at Trinidad and elsewhere. Civil war reigned. Sympa- thetic liberal mass meetings were held allover the country and, of course, the Rockefeller millions received the major portion of the blame. In May, 1914, radicals with mourning bands on their arms picketed 26 Broadway and the town houses of the Rockefel- lers. One excitable young woman with a loaded revolver was ejected from the junior Rockefeller's office. A pictur- esque old woman known as Mother Jones became the Joan of Arc of the coal fields. She stumped the country denouncing the Rockefellers as mur-